By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

August 22, 2014

“Migrant Mother,” Dorothea Lange’s most famous work, was but a face in the crowd. Across the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II, Lange trained her camera on the nation’s tired, its poor, its huddled masses, immortalizing their dignity and despair.

In “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,” an “American Masters” presentation Friday on PBS, a sparingly sentimental Dyanna Taylor, her granddaughter, juxtaposes Lange’s career with her two great loves, the painter Maynard Dixon, whom she met as a budding portraitist in San Francisco, and the economist Paul S. Taylor, her collaborator during her acclaimed stint with the Farm Security Administration. Archival films capture Lange — an apparently deficient young mother — and Taylor interacting warmly with their grandchildren, or follow Lange’s preparations for her 1966 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. She died three months before it opened.

“When you’re working well, all of your instinctive powers are in operation,” Lange said. “And you don’t know why you do the things you do. Sometimes you annihilate yourself. That is something one needs to be able to do.”

Correction: August 31, 2014

The television entry on the Week Ahead page last Sunday about the PBS “American Masters” documentary “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning,” using information from the film, erroneously attributed a distinction to Lange’s 1966 solo show at the Museum of Modern Art. Three other female photographers had solo exhibitions there before Lange; she was not the first.